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Canadians often watch U.S. politics as a coming-attractions reel for political trends here — whatever happens south of the border eventually tends to make it north of the 49th parallel.

But what if the trend line is moving in the opposition direction? What if the 2015 Canadian election was a preview for the political story now playing out in the United States in 2016?

The current Democratic contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders has some noteworthy parallels to the tussle on the progressive left in Canada last year between Justin Trudeau’s Liberals and Thomas Mulcair’s NDP.

Clinton is framing herself as the voice of the cautious, experienced left; Sanders is speaking for a more radical, unapologetic swing leftward. Sound familiar? Here in Canada, Liberals are pretty sure they won the election in October by staking out a space left of the NDP, specifically on a radical suggestion to run up a deficit.

In recent weeks, I’ve been talking to Liberals who aren’t surprised to see Sanders surging against Clinton; it looks a lot to them like what happened here, when progressive voters flocked to the unproven Trudeau against the cautious, more experienced Mulcair.

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And if you’re looking for additional evidence that Canada may be blazing a trail for the U.S. presidential race, take a look at the latest issue of the Atlantic magazine, and an article by Peter Beinart, headlined “Why America is moving left.”

Beinart, a former editor of the New Republic, admits at the outset that he set out to write a very different article. Originally, he wanted to write about the rise of backlash conservatism in the United States.

That seemed like a sensible premise, what with the bellicose Donald Trump taking up so much oxygen in the Republican nomination race.

But the more Beinart looked at it, the more he found the conservative backlash in the U.S. was proving to be “louder than it is strong.” He wrote: “Instead of turning right, the country as a whole is still moving to the left.”

With that finding, Beinart could just as well have been writing about where Canadian politics stood in October — and probably still stands today.

For a while last fall, it seemed as though Canada’s Conservatives might try to cling to power by tapping into simmering pockets of opposition to niqabs, Muslims and Syrian refugees. Remember the proposed snitch line to report “barbaric cultural practices”? As a strategic play for the intolerant vote, it wasn’t much different from Trump’s proposal to ban immigration for Muslims.

But that sentiment, worrying as it was to see in a Canadian election campaign, was also louder than it was strong.

Beinart also writes that America’s leftward tilt has been fuelled by protest movements that were assumed to have limited impact on the larger political landscape — the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations of a few years ago, and Black Lives Matter.

It’s a mistake to assume these two causes are flashes in the pan, Beinart says. Occupy “injected economic inequality into the American political debate” and Black Lives Matter is making Democrats stand up and take sharper notice of ongoing tensions over racism in the U.S.

Again, the parallels to Canada’s politics are striking.

Shortly after the election, it struck me that the seeds of the Liberal victory might have been found in two protest movements we also believed had fizzled. Occupy was also a (briefly) powerful protest in Canada, and while Black Lives Matter is not as large a presence here as it is in the U.S., we did have Idle No More. The Occupy protesters were mainly young people; Idle No More got the country talking about a need for a new relationship with indigenous people.

Liberals won the election on the strength of masses of new voters, many of them young people and indigenous Canadians. Trudeau’s platform promised higher taxes on the “1 per cent” — a phrase popularized by Occupy — and his marching orders to ministers declare that no relationship is more important to this PM than the one with indigenous people.

About a week after last year’s election in Canada, one of President Barack Obama’s former strategists, Jen O’Malley Dillon, wrote in Campaigns and Elections magazine that the Liberal victory contained lessons for the U.S., notably in the way that Trudeau’s team fought using data, grassroots organization and optimism. (Dillon also advised the Liberal campaign.)

Add those items to the list of ways, then, that Canada finds itself in the unusual position of being ahead of trends in the United States. We’ve done it before, too — on same-sex marriage, for example.

In fact, when it comes to progressive politics, Canada is often the trailblazer for the U.S., not vice versa. And if America is veering left in 2016, then our 2015 election could be the coming-attractions reel for U.S. progressives.

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